Download PDF | Marcus Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade: the Limousin and Gascony, c. 970-c. 1130, Clarendon Press, 1993.
352 Pages
CONCENTRATING on the aristocracies of three areas in south-western France—the Limousin, Bordelais and Bazadais, and southern Gascony—this study examines the religious ideas of nobles and knights, with particular reference to why men went on the First Crusade. Bull argues that the Crusaders were inspired by religious ideology, and that the piety of nobles and knights was profoundly influenced by the church, but he rejects the view that there was a parallelism between lay religious beliefs and the clerical intellectual position as articulated by Urban II. He begins by examining in depth two issues that are cited as evidence for such a parallelism: the 11th century Peace of God movement and contemporary vernacular literature. He then describes the close contact between nobility and local monastic communities as the source of the French nobles’ religious ideas, and adds the notion of penance, and the perception of the crusade as a form of pilgrimage to their motives for joining the First Crusade.
Preface
IN what follows, most references to a text found in edited cartularies and collections of documents are to the text’s number, which is rendered in arabic numerals whatever the convention used by the editor. In those cases where I wish to draw attention to a specific passage within a long document, or whenever there is scope for ambiguity, the text’s number is introduced by ‘no.’ and/or the page reference is supplied. Documents’ dates are usually given in the footnote if this is not apparent from the main text. In some instances, however, fixing upon a date must involve speculation, and in those cases in which too much guesswork appeared necessary it has seemed preferable not to volunteer suggestions. The dates given for certain documents depart from those suggested by the editors; but when this work was in preparation it became obvious that to justify every proposed correction in a consistent manner would require an unwieldy, and frequently superfluous, critical apparatus. I have therefore elaborated on my reasons for revising dates only when this appeared integral to the argument. Dates are rendered using the following conventions: 1068—96=a continuous period between the two years; 1068 X 1096=an unspecifiable year within the two years inclusive. Narrative sources which exist in standard and commonly available editions are not cited by book and/or chapter. In the case of old editions which may soon be superseded, however, it has seemed useful to supply book and/or chapter number in parentheses; the same applies to recent editions of works which readers may wish to consult in an older version. Biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version or the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the many debts which I have incurred. The Institute of Historical Research and the British Academy elected me to Fellowships which afforded the opportunity to complete this work. The librarians and staff of the Institute of Historical Research, the British Library, and the Bibliothéque Municipale, Bordeaux, provided invaluable assistance in finding materials and answering my many queries. Requests for microfilms, photocopies, information, and advice were kindly met by the Bibliothéque Nationale, the Société Archéologique et Historique du Limousin, and the Archives Départementales of Creuse, Gers, Gironde, Hautes-Pyrénées, and Landes. The Department of History at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College made available funds for me to attend a conference in the United States, where I was able to sound out some of the ideas contained in the Introduction. My indebtedness to a number of individual friends and scholars is very great. They have saved me from many errors; those that remain are, of course, entirely my own. My interest in Medieval History was first aroused by the inspirational teaching of David Jones. Professor Daniel Callahan generously provided me with a volume which did much to aid my understanding of the Peace of God. Justin Jacyno kindly drew drafts of the two maps. Dr Nigel Saul read an early draft of two chapters and suggested improvements, and Professor Norman Housley read the whole work in a later version. Professor Christopher Brooke and Brenda Bolton, who examined the thesis on which this book is based, made many pertinent observations and offered useful advice, for which I am very grateful. I have benefited a great deal from many discussions with Dr Jonathan Phillips and Dr Christoph Maier. John Doran has been an unfailing source of interesting insights into the life of the church, medieval and modern. In the later stages of this work’s preparation Lucy Pratt gave much valued support. Vera and Eric Burden graciously submitted themselves to the toil of reading many drafts and never flagged in their encouragement. My warm thanks also go to the Delegates and staff of the Oxford University Press, especially Sophie MacCallum, who addressed my often trifling queries with patience, scholarship, and good sense. To my former supervisor, Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, I owe an enormous debt. It has been a privilege to benefit from his kind generosity, enthusiasm, and erudition. Finally, I must thank the members of my family, without whose emotional and material support this project could never have reached completion. The dedication of this book can be no more than a gesture of my deep appreciation.
M.G.B.
Introduction
THIS book examines the religious ideas of nobles and knights, with particular reference to the reasons why men went on the First Crusade (1095—1101). There have been many valuable studies of aristocratic piety in the Central Middle Ages, but few have concentrated specifically upon the response to crusading.’ It would be impracticable to study the whole of Latin Europe, or indeed all of France. Consequently what follows concentrates upon the aristocracies of three parts of south-western France: the southern and central (or Bas-) Limousin; the Bordelais and Bazadais; and southern Gascony, an area roughly bounded by the upper reaches of the River Adour, the Landes, and the Pyrenees. (The last two areas will sometimes be collectively termed ‘Gascony’.)* To this extent the present study is inspired by the methods of a popular product of French medieval scholarship in recent years, the regional monograph. It departs from most of the works of this genre, however, in that they seldom devote much attention to the significance of crusading apart from its influence on a small number of themes, such as patterns of land-tenure and mortality rates within a few well-documented families.* This study’s terminal dates are ¢.970—c.1130. They are intended to be approximate only, and have been chosen for two reasons: it is from around the third quarter of the tenth century that documentary evidence for these areas becomes available in significant quantities (though there is some earlier Limousin material); and by continuing for about three decades after the First Crusade it is possible to follow the careers of early crusaders to their conclusion.
The crusade proved to be one of the most important and enduring features of medieval civilization. On 27 November 1095, in a meadow near Clermont in the Auvergne, Pope Urban II made a speech which formally proclaimed an armed expedition to the Holy Land. Within four years forces from western Europe were in control of Jerusalem and pockets of land in Palestine and Syria. Within six years large expeditions which had set out from the West to support the fledgling Latin territories had been crushed by Turkish armies in Asia Minor. Despite this and other early setbacks, however, the Latin presence in the Levant survived. With the benefit of hindsight, the expedition which Pope Urban launched has become known as the First Crusade. Historians can now see that the events of 1095-1101 marked the beginnings of a distinctive institution which was to spread to such diverse regions as the Iberian peninsula, the shores of the Baltic, Italy, and Languedoc, and which was to occupy the energies of many thousands of people throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern period.
Given the popularity and longevity of crusade ideas, it can sometimes require an effort of the imagination to appreciate that Pope Urban’s plan in 1095 was remarkably innovative. Urban did not devise the crusade in vacuo, of course, and it is possible to identify precedents which almost certainly influenced his ideas. Particularly relevant was a plan for a Western expedition to the East which had been mooted by Pope Gregory VII in 1074. In the event, Gregory’s scheme came to nothing, partly because it was overtaken by the papacy’s quarrels with the German monarchy, and partly because Gregory placed too great an emphasis on what the papacy stood to gain from the expedition at the expense of clear statements of the material or spiritual benefits which the participants might enjoy. Nevertheless, the scheme of 1074 provides valuable pointers to some of the themes which Urban developed twenty-one years later.‘ Other precedents were also significant. For example, in 1089 Urban himself had proposed to the faithful of Catalonia that its support of the frontier church of Tarragona would merit the same spiritual rewards which an individual might achieve by means of a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem or elsewhere. Urban’s readiness to link ideas of Christian expansion, pilgrimage, the Holy Land, and penance anticipated some of the most important elements of the crusade appeal. As in the case of the abortive scheme of 1074, the papacy’s concern for Tarragona demonstrates that Urban’s crusade plans had some form of prehistory.°
It would be wrong to conclude, however, that, because Urban’s crusade scheme was not a bolt from the blue, Latin Christian society saw, or should have seen, the crusade coming. It is salutary to read the words of two observers who were deeply impressed by the manner in which the crusade appeared to the faithful as an exciting and new opportunity. One, Guibert of Nogent, described the crusade’s impact upon Christians generally:
in our time God instituted holy warfare, so that the arms-bearers [ordo equestris} and the wandering populace {valgus oberrans}, who after the fashion of the ancient pagans were engaged in mutual slaughters, should find a new way of attaining salvation; so that they might not be obliged to abandon the world completely, as used to be the case, by adopting the monastic way of life or any other form of professed calling, but might obtain God’s grace to some extent while enjoying their accustomed freedom and dress, and in a way consistent with their own station.°
The other observer, Ralph of Caen, condensed the appeal of the crusade to its effect upon his hero, the Norman lord from southern Italy Tancred fitz Marquis, who was described as a conspicuous model of lay probity and a ‘diligent listener to God’s precepts’:
day after day his prudent mind was in turmoil, and he burned with anxiety all the more because he saw that the warfare which flowed from his position of authority {mtlitiae suae certamina} obstructed the Lord’s commands. For the Lord enjoins that the struck cheek and the other one be offered to the striker, whereas secular authority [mzlitia saecularis} requires that not even relatives’ blood be spared. The Lord warns that one’s tunic, and one’s cloak too, must be given to the man intending to take them away; but the imperatives of authority [mz/itiae necessitas] demand that a man who has been deprived of both should have whatever else remains taken from him. Thus, this incompatibility dampened the courage of the wise man whenever he was allowed an opportunity for quiet reflection. But after the judgement of Pope Urban granted a remission of sins to every Christian setting out to overcome the Gentiles, then at last the man’s energies were aroused, as though he had earlier been asleep; his strength was renewed, his eyes opened, and his courage was redoubled. For until then . . . his mind was torn two ways, uncertain which path to follow, that of che Gospel, or that of the world.’
Despite their very different perspectives—Guibert, a learned and introspective abbot, was one of the finest products of the Benedictine culture of his day,® Ralph a Norman knight who did not go on the First Crusade but who settled in the Latin East some years later?—these two commentators saw the impact of the crusade in remarkably similar terms. Both men understood that the crusade provided a novel opportunity for laymen to be saved. Both appreciated that before 1095—6 the lay condition had inevitably impeded men’s chances of salvation. Both realized that the crusade vocation addressed, if only in part, pious impulses which had only been met previously by entry into professed religion. It is perhaps unremarkable that Guibert should have placed a monastic slant on his interpretation of crusading; but it is significant that Ralph, whose convoluted and allusive Latin shows that he was impressively educated (he had once been intended for a career in the secular church), did so too. Ralph’s passage is similar to contemporary hagiographical texts describing the mental agonies of men who converted to religion as adults;'° and the necessary implication of Tancred’s desire to follow the ‘path of the Gospel’ was that he would have had to enter a religious order had not the crusade Opportunity presented itself.
The following study may be treated as an extended commentary upon Guibert’s and Ralph’s observations, in particular the symbiosis they believed existed between crusading and professed religion. It is reasonable to suppose that the two commentators’ analysis of the crusade appeal can be applied to parts of western Europe other than those regions where they lived or knew well (Ralph, after all, had not witnessed Tancred’s ‘conversion’). On the basis of what Guibert and Ralph believed were the decisive elements of Pope Urban’s appeal, it is a valuable exercise to put oneself in the position of laymen from an area such as south-western France hearing the crusade message for the first time in 1095—6, and to examine the influences which might have operated on men’s minds when they decided to take the cross. The body of ideas which came to make up the received orthodoxy of the First Crusade by about 1110 had three principal sources: the original crusade message preached by Pope Urban and other ecclesiastics in the West; the beliefs which developed within the crusade army between 1097 and 1099, as it became convinced that it had become the chosen instrument of God’s will; and the subsequent analysis by western writers, such as Guibert, of how the literally miraculous success of the expedition fitted into God’s providential scheme for mankind.'! The last two sources of ideas were influenced by the experience of crusading itself; the first, patently, was not. This means that it is necessary to sift through the features of Latin Christian society before 1095 in order to isolate factors which would have reified the novel crusade appeal for the faithful.
This study proceeds from the basic premiss that the reasons why men went on the First Crusade were overwhelmingly ideological. Pope Urban expressly forbade men to join the expedition for pay or honours, but it seems that in so doing he was simply being cautious. '” The crusaders had to finance themselves, although the humbler among them might have anticipated becoming the clients of the richer lords taking part. It has been estimated that a lord or knight intending to fund his journey to the East would have had to liquidize assets to the value of four or five times his annual income.'? These are, if anything, conservative figures. According to more than one version of Urban II's speech at Clermont, the pope appealed to the fact that many Westerners were acquainted with the eastern Mediterranean world by reason of pilgrimages to Jerusalem.'* Thus it is reasonable to suppose that, on the basis of direct experience or stories related by others, the intelligent crusader would have had few illusions about any supposed treasures of the Orient. What is more, the crusaders were not driven by land-hunger. It is likely that the pope anticipated the creation of some permanent Latin presence in the East under the authority of the Byzantine emperor, and many more departing crusaders may have intended to settle in Palestine than in fact did so.'° But, as the Cistercians and countless assarters were to prove in the twelfth century, western Europe had far from exhausted its capacity for internal territorial expansion by the 1090s; and the crusade seems an almost perversely esoteric way to have satisfied any powerful colonial instincts. In the same way that crusaders were prepared to pay heavily for their experience, the intention of some westerners to stay in the East should be treated as an expression of crusade ideology.
This crusade ideology was predominantly religious in its inspiration. A caveat needs to be entered immediately, however, for other, overtly secular, values were also important. In particular two overlapping groups of ideas contributed to crusaders’ enthusiasm. One set of ideas was expressed through appeals to the faithful’s sense of national or racial pride, especially (because the crusade was pitched mainly at Frenchmen)!® the emotional associations of Frankishness. One crusade chronicler, Robert the Monk, believed that at Clermont Urban II evoked the Franks’ historical self-awareness and pride with great force;'’ other writers, with varying emphasis, exploited honorific connotations of Franc-stem words in their accounts of the crusade’s origins and progress. '®
The impact of Frankish sentiment in 1095—6, however, needs to be set in its broad context. In the late eleventh century France was politically fragmented, and its king, who was the natural focus of national feeling, had little residual authority in temporal affairs beyond the fle-de-France. Furthermore, there is evidence that the participants on the First Crusade retained a strong sense of identity based on their attachment to localities or regions back in the West.'? When the army was subjected to great stresses, linguistic and cultural differences became exacerbated—between northern and southern French in particular—and could sometimes erupt into violence.*° Yet, in spite of these antagonisms, the crusade forces usually retained a remarkable level of cohesion. Thus, for observers such as the southern Italian Norman author of the Gesta Francorum, who went on the crusade and identified strongly with the world of northern France, Franc-stem terms expressed well enough the unifying features of an army which came up against non-Latin races such as Greeks, Turks, and Arabs, and in which men from Gaul in general, and speakers of mutually intelligible northern /angue d’oil dialects in particular, formed the dominant element.?' This unifying process was accelerated within the crusade army by the Latins’ perception that their Muslim adversaries treated them as a single entity.** As the ability of the crusaders to weld polyglot forces together became perceived as one sign of God’s support for the expedition, sO a unitary sense of Frankishness became an element of crusade ideology.?? (It is significant that the work of ideological justification was mainly the work of writers with roots in northern France.) There are interesting parallels here with the manner in which the conquest of England was retrospectively explained and justified by notions of Norman prowess and readiness to fight for the church.*4 Given that in some contexts Franc-stem vocabulary excluded men from southern France, and that some crusaders—Anglo-Saxons and non-Catalan Spaniards, for example—came from groups to which even the widest acceptation of Frankishness was inapplicable before the crusade,?’ it is likely that appeals to racial or patriotic self-esteem in 1095-6 were, more often than not, pitched at a regional level. A closely contemporary account suggests that Pope Urban himself did precisely this in Anjou in February 1096;7° and the technique was most probably repeated elsewhere. ~’
The other group of secular values which contributed to crusade enthusiasm comprised ideas which were forerunners of the chivalric ethos, particularly, in this context, notions of military prestige and family honour. It is significant, for example, that the crusade vocation very soon came to be interpreted as a form of vendetta.7® As in the case of the appeal to Frankishness, however, the original call to crusaders’ militaristic and honorific ideology was amplified and distorted by subsequent events. Moreover, as a self-sustaining value-system which could motivate action for its own sake, chivalry did not exist in anything more than an embryonic form before the second half of the twelfth century.?? Before then—as a broad generalization embracing regional variations—men of the various social and juridical classes who fought on horseback were bonded by their shared experiences of training and war, by family and feudal ties, and by a horse- and weapons-centred martial culture. As yet, however, there was no coherent ethos to lend all mounted warriors a caste-identity with its own distinctive duties and patterns of behaviour. It is noteworthy that recent research has established that dubbing, which eventually became the formal rite of passage into the chivalric caste, had not fully developed this precise function by ¢c.1100.°° As Pope Urban toured France in 1095—6 preaching the cross, he passed through areas which differed in terms of the social status conveyed by the word miles, and the social exclusivity, authority, and size of the senior aristocratic élite identified by such terms as principes and nobiles.*‘ Those who preached the cross on the pope’s behalf elsewhere would have found the same.>? Extraordinary levels of advance intelligence and precise attention to semantic subtleties would have been required for the crusade message to have been pitched differently from area to area according to regional variations in social structure. In fact, this was not necessary, for, when the pope encouraged mz/ites to go on the crusade, he was above all making a practical point about restricting participation to the men best suited for the task in hand.*? Only indirectly, and differently from region to region, could his words be construed as a coded appeal to what, with the benefit of hindsight, might be termed proto-chivalric values. All that was necessary for Urban’s appeal to have relevance in a given region was that the upper social levels of that locality should comprise men who professed expertise in the use of arms, especially on horseback. This very straightforward precondition was satisfied throughout France and in virtually all parts of Latin Europe.
Like sentiments of regional or national pride, embryonic chivalric values may be treated as secondary reasons why men went on the crusade— but not in the sense that they simply ‘topped up’ other motives. One way to approach the significance of racial—national and militaristic ideas is to imagine that they operated on the level of what in psychoanalytical parlance are termed ‘cognitive assumptions’: sets of values (drawn from everyday life and so self-justifying that they seldom need articulating) by which an individual understands an experience and judges his or her response to it. In other words, patriotic and militaristic enthusiasms might have influenced the way in which an arms-bearer interpreted the crusade appeal: they cannot adequately explain why he should have been thinking about it in the first place. At the heart of the crusade message lay an appeal to piety.
Most treatments of the origins of the First Crusade have not distinguished clearly between the roots of the religious values of the laymen who went on the expedition and the ideas of the clerical intellectuals who developed the canonical and theological theories which made the crusade concept possible. An emphasis upon the crusade’s intellectual origins is methodologically sound, for the historian can draw upon the products of an impressive literary culture—chronicles, collections of canon law, polemical tractates, papal letters—through which arguments and counterarguments can be seen to develop and ideas mature or perish. In a sense, research along these lines has a satisfying focus, for it all converges upon Pope Urban’s mind at the very moment he began to speak at Clermont.
The greatest exponent of this type of approach was the German scholar Carl Erdmann, whose Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens appeared in 1935.°* Erdmann traced the idea of crusading through the medieval church’s shifting attitudes to violence, and in particular to two issues: whether the church had the powers to authorize war; and whether there were circumstances in which soldiers, the Fifth Commandment notwithstanding, could treat violence as spiritually beneficial or at least morally neutral. Erdmann’s arguments have been extensively revised by recent scholarship. In particular, there is now a broad consensus that he underestimated the extent to which the crusade was conceived as a form of pilgrimage as well as a holy war;*? and it has recently been argued that the canonical position on just violence in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries was not as consistent as he supposed.*© But Erdmann’s contribution to crusade studies has been so valuable that he does not deserve to become a soft target for modern researchers. Some of the following chapters open with a discussion of Erdmann’s arguments, not in order to score easy points, but as a recognition of his great influence on all subsequent work in the field. However much Erdmann has been criticized in matters of detail, his overall vision has remained compelling. Studies by Delaruelle,*’ Villey,*® Rousset,>® Mayer,*° Brundage,*! and Becker*? have examined the crusade’s causes wholly or in substantial part through theological and canonical texts produced by the church’s educated élite.
This study does not question the validity of the techniques of Erdmann and his successors, for unquestionably Urban II’s ideas in 1095 had an intellectual pedigree. Rather, it is worth challenging an assumption often made on the basis of the Erdmann-type perspective: that the intellectual origins of the crusade idea largely subsumed the reasons why at least the more discriminating members of the rank and file took part in the expedition. Such an assumption requires the belief that, for every important stand which the eleventh-century church took on such issues as just war and meritorious violence, there was an equivalent and concordant lay position, simplified but not fundamentally different in character. The notion of clerical—lay parallelism is not inherently implausible, for it is important to remember that at most times and in most circumstances the church has been a largely reactive body, accommodating its ideas and practices to the faithful’s expectations. The two generations before the First Crusade were, however, an exception to the general rule. The church had become an active proponent of reform, challenging old habits of mind. More particularly, the papacy had placed itself at the forefront of reforming efforts (perhaps uniquely in its history). This great shift in the attitudes of the later eleventh-century church (a movement embraced by the terms ‘Gregorian Reform’ and ‘Investiture Contest’) means that the notion of a lay culture in tune with all ecclesiastics’ ideas needs to be tested carefully against specific problems concerning the crusade.
The first two chapters of this book examine the two most commonly cited arguments in support of clerical—lay parallelism: the Peace and Truce of God, church-inspired peace movements which touched some parts of Latin Europe from the late tenth century; and the eleventhcentury Spanish Reconquista, the process of Christian expansion at the expense of the Moors of southern Iberia. It is argued here that the influence of the Peace of God on the laity’s reaction to thé crusade message has been exaggerated. The fact that Peace ideas appear in early crusade texts has no deep significance, because the expedition’s organizers simply wanted to promote domestic stability in order to stimulate recruitment. The eleventh-century Peace was sporadic and geographically uneven in its impact. In Aquitaine, for example, it was fitfully important between ¢.990 and ¢.1035, and even at its height it did not involve appeals to Christian morality or the supposed ethics of a warrior caste as much as an accommodation between two small and closely related groups, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the successors of the Carolingian high aristocracy, who could no longer take for granted strong public authority predicated on effective royal power.
Turning to Spain, it is often supposed that the eleventh-century church by turns stimulated and was influenced by a nascent ethos of holy war directed against Islam and bred by the Christian expansion which is now known by the loaded term Reconquista. Chapter 2 argues that Frenchmen—to whom the First Crusade message was mainly directed—had had minimal experience of war in Spain by 1095-6. Before then French campaigns in the peninsula had been few in number, on a much smaller scale than the First Crusade, firmly controlled by peninsular rulers (whose domestic policies and rivalries were more complex than a straightforward notion of holy war could embrace), and motivated predominantly by a desire for material gain. Furthermore, crusading in Spain was not wholly an autochthonous phenomenon for some years after the First Crusade. It rather drew much of its inspiration and support from external forces such as the papacy and former first crusaders from France. Influences of this sort, and the fact that it was about two decades before crusading values had a significant impact on peninsular affairs, demonstrate that Spain was not the breeding-ground for a holy war ethos which only needed fine tuning to become crusade enthusiasm.
The Peace of God and Spain before 1095 do not exhaust the possible parallelisms between lay values and ecclesiastical ideas about violence— the Christian expansion into Sicily in the later eleventh century is another potential area of enquiry—but these two topics have occupied a dominant place in scholarly debate.4* They are particularly relevant within the scope of this study because south-western France was the region where the Peace originated, and where links to Spain west of Catalonia might be expected to have been strong. Chapters 1 and 2 necessarily differ in emphasis from the rest of this book in that they attempt to establish a negative. Even so, it is a valuable exercise to discuss the Peace and Spain at some length, for in this way the ground can be cleared satisfactorily for an analysis of the positive roots of first crusaders’ ideas.
Only a minority of crusade studies have treated the ideas of the laity as a discrete subject. What attention has been given to the topic has relied largely on vernacular literature, especially epic songs.*4 Valuable as vernacular works are as sources for laymen’s ideas, they must be used with great caution. No extant text of a chanson de geste can be confidently dated to before the First Crusade. What is generally considered the oldest text, the Bodleian version of the Chanson de Roland,*> was almost certainly produced in the twelfth century.*° Of course, it is a matter of debate how far the surviving chansons had an oral or textual prehistory before the twelfth century.*” But even the earliest known version of the Roland cannot embody a tradition which had passed unaltered through the experience of the First Crusade: the influence of crusade values and ideas is simply too strong.*® Thus too great a reliance on vernacular texts can produce a picture of lay ideas distorted by a process similar to the ideological reworking which influenced the early western chroniclers of the First Crusade: what may appear to be antecedent, formative factors contributing to the crusade’s origins prove to be, in fact, the creations of the crusading experience itself.
One of the most extended treatments of the laity’s contribution to First Crusade ideas, by Alphandéry and Dupront, appeared in 1954.4? While the authors stressed the importance of popular religious sentiment, particularly as it was manifested by pilgrimage traditions and western interest in Jerusalem, they did so in general terms and by focusing upon eschatological responses which, they believed, sufficed to explain the crusade’s attraction. It has more recently been argued that eschatological fears were only a minor element in the crusaders’ motives.°° In 1956 Adolf Waas made the clearest statement to date that the ideas of ecclesiastics and lay crusaders were not coextensive.”' He maintained that the ideas of the laity stemmed from a self-contained value-system which was distinct from the preoccupations of the church, though borrowings were possible in both directions. Waas expressed the lay value-system as Ritterfrommigkeit, the piety of knights. His thesis is weakened by his extensive use of vernacular texts which post-date the First Crusade, and by his belief that the code of chivalry was reaching maturity by 1095, Nevertheless, his broad concept of Ritterfrommigkeit is valuable and deserves to be explored more fully.
Contrary to Waas’s position, this book argues that the piety of nobles and knights was profoundly influenced by the church, and in fact needed the church for its inspiration—but not where Erdmann and his successors were looking. This study puts itself in the position of an arms-bearer from south-western France whose mental map was most likely very localized (apart from possible experiences of some distant places through pilgrimage) and who could not have had the modern historian’s perspective on contemporary intellectual currents. Where did his religious values come from? The answer is, in large measure, from local religious communities staffed by monks or canons. These institutions, it is true, did not have a complete monopoly of religious influence over the armsbearing aristocracy. There is evidence that it became more common from the latter half of the eleventh century for lords to retain the services of chaplains;>* and there are a few indications of laymen attracted to the spirituality of hermits.°? But the main potential rivals to religious communities, the parish clergy, were generally poorly educated and often of a lower social status than arms-bearers. In terms of learning, wealth, and prestige, most regional churches were dominated by monks, to whom may be added bishops, and the canons, secular or regular, who were based in cathedrals or separate communities.
A good deal of useful information about laymen’s religious practices and ideas can be gleaned from narrative sources such as hagiographical texts and chronicles. Gascony was not a notable centre of history-writing in this period, but the study of the Limousin is enriched by the work of two writers: Adhemar of Chabannes, a Limousin who maintained a keen interest in his homeland after he had become a monk in Angouléme, producing three recensions of a valuable chronicle between ¢.1025 and ¢.1032 as well as many other works;>* and Geoffrey of Vigeois, who wrote his chronicle after our period, in 1183, but recorded a good deal of important information about the eleventh century.”
Valuable as narratives are, however, the principal sources for the impact of religious communities upon their local aristocracies are charters: documents which record laymen’s grants to religious bodies by way of gift, sale, or pledge, as well as confirmations of existing rights. Chapters 3-6 contain treatments of particular features of the charters, but it is worth making some general points here about how these documents have been used. In the regions of south-western France covered by this study (and in many other places) very few original charters from before the twelfth century are extant. Documents earlier than this typically survive in cartularies, compendia of a religious community’s muniments which were drawn up by the monks or canons for ease of reference.°° Some of the cartularies were produced long after the date of the earliest material they contain; and some are later medieval copies of earlier versions. Others survive only as copies or extracts made by antiquaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the turmoil of the French Revolution swept the originals away. It is fortunate, for example, that the indefatigable copier of medieval texts Etienne Baluze (1630-1718) was a native of the Limousin. He retained an interest in the region of his birth and recorded many of its old documents.”’ It is largely thanks to him and other copyists that many of the records of the important abbeys of Uzerche and Tulle, to name but two, have survived. The layered history of copying and recopying means that most eleventh-century documents are now in some state of textual decomposition, so that, for example, many can be dated only very approximately, if at all.
Enough charters survive in a tolerably intact state, however, to establish an important point: that it is a valid exercise to examine en bloc charters from different types of religious community, from different parts of south-western France, and from throughout the period covered by this study. Religious communities differed in their spirituality, so that the doctrinal and devotional statements made in their charters might vary subtly. To pursue this question in detail, however, would require a book in its own right. The absence here of this sort of detailed analysis can be justified on two grounds. First, the influence of using earlier documents as models, and the constant applicability to acts of benefaction of a limited range of scriptural or doctrinal statements, resulted in a notable level of homogeneity among charters from different places and times. Secondly, whatever fine distinctions might be detected between the diplomatic utterances of individual religious communities would be impossible to correlate with what is known of local levels of response to the First Crusade appeal. Consider the case of the great abbey of Cluny in southern Burgundy. It was the most prestigious monastery in eleventhcentury Europe, and its charters contain some of the most elaborate and varied preambles to be found in this period. Furthermore, Cluny’s documents contain references to more early crusaders than do the records of most contemporary institutions.*® Once we discount, however, the abbey’s wealth and prestige, the fact that its documents survive in unusual abundance, and Pope Urban II's close personal ties to the community (he had been prior there), it would be impossible to state with confidence that the level of response to the crusade appeal in Cluny’s part of Burgundy was directly linked to particular nuances in the religious statements of its charters. Thus it is licit to examine together the records of Benedictine (including Cluniac) communities, canons regular, and secular cathedral chapters to the extent that the differences between their vocations did not impinge appreciably on their charters. (Variations in such documents as privileges and custumals were more pronounced, of course.) Similarly, the charters’ religious ideas were remarkably consistent between the terminal dates of this study. Given the broadly homogenous characteristics of the documentary evidence, it is possible to identify the broad themes behind the ideas which were transmitted between the laity and religious institutions. If this approach requires some generalization, it is at least hoped that it is sufficiently grounded in the pious careers of identifiable individuals and families, and in the histories of specific religious communities, to avoid a criticism which can be levelled at some treatments of the lay response to crusading: that an emphasis upon sources such as chansons or canonical collections depersonalizes what happened at the grass-roots level when men heard the cross preached.
This study mostly uses the term ‘arms-bearer’ to denote individuals within a broad social spectrum ranging from the great territorial princes to humble mounted soldiers, men based in castles as dependants of their lords or living from allods or fiefs. This usage is intended to avoid the ambiguity of the usual translation of miles as ‘knight’, a loaded term which bears many chivalric connotations inapplicable to the eleventh century. It is unfortunate that there is in English no convenient way to express the subtle but significant nuances conveyed in French by the cognates chevalier/cavalier or in German by Ritter/Reiter. Arms-bearers, thus defined, dominate the charters. Even when due allowance is made for the fact that humbler persons were far less likely to generate written records, it is clear that by the time of the First Crusade arms-bearers and their families were the lay group closest to religious communities and thus most receptive to the ideas which were associated with such practices as conversion and benefaction. Senior princes and castellans had the most resources from which to endow religious bodies and, generally speaking, long family traditions of support of the church. But by the later eleventh century lesser mi/ites were also often in close contact with monks and canons. This is particularly demonstrated by cases in which lords consented to alienations of property rights which had earlier been made by their fideles.°?
In this context, it is worth explaining why this study concentrates upon the religious ideas of men characterized by the use of the horse in combat. When Pope Urban planned the crusade, he was in part reacting to appeals for military help from the Byzantine empire, which was on the defensive against Turkish forces. The pope would have been aware that there were recent precedents for western mounted troops serving (at least notionally) under Byzantine command.®° Any type of force might have been welcome to the Greeks; but Latin Europe’s pre-eminent and unique contribution to warfare in this period was the corps of armoured, mounted shock troops.°! These were the men whom Emperor Alexius I Comnenus wanted most and the pope understood best.
In the event, the response to the crusade appeal embraced many levels of lay society, for Urban II discovered that he could not restrict what was essentially a pastoral message to only a minority of the faithful. Apart from clerics and women of all classes who went on crusade, those who travelled east with the mounted forces can be placed in two broad categories: the poor; and the foot-soldiers. The poor, urban and rural, were generally non-combatants. During the expedition they assumed some useful functions as auxiliary personnnel, and their numbers meant that they were not without influence in the direction of certain stages of the campaign. Generally, however, they were a logistical and financial burden on the army.°* The foot-soldiers (pedites) were in a more ambivalent position. Once Pope Urban realized, such was the enthusiasm for his crusade message, that the armies he had launched were larger than anticipated, he would have accepted that large-scale western forces often included archers and men equipped to fight hand-to-hand.°? The pedites proved to be a significant element of the crusade army, for example by strengthening the Christian battle-lines between cavalry engagements.™ They also shared to some extent the devotional self-awareness of the whole ‘army of God’, although the blend of literal and vocational connotations expressed in the term milites Christi could not apply to them.©
During the crusade, as most of the mounted troops’ horses died and all the Latins suffered great hardships, the dividing lines between the three main classes of crusaders became very blurred, making it difficult by this stage to isolate a distinctive arms-bearers’ response to crusading. On the other hand, the blurring process largely coincided with the second and third phases in the formation of crusade ideas which were noted earlier. In 1095-6 there still existed something approaching a pristine crusade appeal directed principally at mounted soldiers. This does not resolve the problem why the poor and the pedites went east, and it is beyond the scope of this study to attempt a full answer. It can only be tentatively suggested here that, although educated observers were sometimes mortified by the naivety of humble crusaders’ ideas,®° it would be unwise to make a rigid distinction between an ‘orthodox’, church-inspired motivation on the part of the mounted élite, and the beliefs of the ‘wandering populace’, millenarian, simplistic, and ill-informed. There is more likely to have been a sliding scale of responses corresponding to the extent to which different social groups had been exposed to the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s teachings in the years before 1095. In addition, it is worth noting that the religious values of arms-bearers are an area of study in their own right simply because they are far better documented than the beliefs of other lay groups in this period.
Chapter 3 establishes the mechanics of how religious ideas passed between monasteries and local arms-bearing families. It argues in particular that the variety of forms of entry into professed religion created a network of family ties between churches and their neighbours. Given the great significance which arms-bearers attached to notions of kinship, these networks expressed the intimacy of ecclesiastical—lay contacts and created the channels through which religious ideas could flow back and forth. Chapter 4 turns to those religious ideas themselves, chiefly as they are revealed by the charters, it being argued that these documents can profitably be used to reconstruct lay pious beliefs. A discussion of the notions of the afterlife which inform the charters is supplemented by an analysis of some literary accounts of the next world. The charters and narratives demonstrate that arms-bearers had some quite sophisticated ideas about penance and a ‘middle place’ between Heaven and Hell: ideas which have a direct bearing upon the response to the First Crusade appeal. Chapter 5 argues that of the traditional trinity of crusade origins— holy war (particularly in Spain), the Peace of God, and pilgrimage—the last element needs to be retained in a discussion of laymen’s ideas. This is so for two reasons. First, the crusade was a species of pilgrimage, and pilgrimage was a common expression of the cultic popular religion of the years before (and after) 1095. Second, pilgrimage was not a discrete, selfcontained form of devotion, but rather fitted easily into the broader patterns of pious behaviour revealed by laymen’s relations with local religious institutions. Pilgrimage thus provides further evidence of the value-system discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses how arms-bearers heard and responded to the preaching of the cross in 1095-1101, and links the impact of the crusade message to themes contained in Chapters 3-5.
Reduced to a single statement, this study argues that the reasons why arms-bearers from certain parts of south-western France (and very possibly from elsewhere) went on the First Crusade can be traced in patterns of behaviour and sets of ideas which were principally moulded by contacts with professed religion. To this extent it is unnecessary to hunt for grand themes or movements to explain the crusade, extraordinary as it was. The crusaders’ ideas were rooted in the commonplace and unexceptional. This is not to argue that the crusade was a necessary consequence of the nature of Latin Christian society at the end of the eleventh century; it would be mistaken to imagine the West in the years before 1095 consciously preparing itself for the crusade message. Nevertheless, the success of Urban’s appeal deserves to be explained on a deeper level than that of historical accident. It is in this context that the comments of Guibert of Nogent and Ralph of Caen are important clues, for when these observers attempted to explain the crusade’s attraction they chose to emphasize a range of ideas associated with ‘the monastic way of life or any other form of professed calling’.
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